Saturday, April 05, 2008

Search tomorrow’s web, today!

The next time someone says the world ends tomorrow, tell them you'll look it up and let them know in a few minutes.Google Australia has introduced a new feature called gDay, enabling you to search content on the internet before it is created. Google spokesman Loo Flirpa said, "Using machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed inGoogle’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future. We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow’s share price movements, sports results or news events. Even tomorrow’s lotto numbers. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they’re written!"About gDay™ technologyThe core technology that powers gDay™ is MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, they can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

To rank these future pages in order of relevance, gDay™ uses a statistical extrapolation of a page’s future PageRank, called SageRank.gDay™ and MATE™ were developed in Google’s Sydney R&D centre.

Frequently Asked Questions From Google gDay's Loo FlirpaQ: How far into the future can gDay™ search? A: 24 hours. We have found that results beyond this period are statistically unreliable. For example, early trials of gDay – searching 365 days into the future – predicted Sergey Brin and Larry Page as joint winners of the 2008 Brownlow Medal.Q: How accurate is gDay™? A: Anywhere between 75% and 95%. It depends on the website in question and the day of the week (for example, our spiders don’t work Sundays).Q: What future websites do you search? A: Only websites in Australia are included in the Beta. We’re a day ahead of the US anyway, which makes MATE™ technology more reliable.Q: Wait a second. I live in the US. Does this mean I’m now 2 days behind Australia? A: Yes. Yes it does.Q: Can gDay™ help me find where I left my keys? A: Yes! Your best bet is to keep a blog of all items you have lost and found in a given day and where you last saw them and found them. Search your blog using gDay™ and problem solved! MATE™ technology will determine a likely entry for tomorrow.Q: Can gDay™ predict tomorrow’s Lotto numbers? A: Yes, all past lotto results are publicly available on the web so gDay™ can extrapolate tomorrow’s results, but supplementary numbers and Super66 are still a bit dicey.Q: Doesn’t this raise moral issues, like inappropriate share trading? A: Not at all. gDay™ will give all Australians access to tomorrow’s share price movements. This will minimise shareholder risk and give everyone the chance to buy and sell shares at the right time and price. Further, homehunters won’t have to waste time showing up to auctions for properties that sell above their budget.Q: Why is this section titled "frequently asked questions", when the product is barely released? A: We used gDay™ to work out the questions that people would ask. Try Google gDay yourself. The site isHERE.The link is at the bottom.